Huffman letter protests Trump’s offshore oil drilling plan

Lawmaker one of leaders in fighting Trump’s plan

Rep. Jared Huffman and two other members of Congress have taken the lead in a letter to Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke protesting the Trump administration’s offshore oil drilling plan.

“There are going to be waves of litigation over this,” said Huffman, D-San Rafael.

The Trump administration this month announced a proposal to allow drilling in most U.S. continental-shelf waters, including areas of the Atlantic and the Arctic. At the time, Zinke specified 47 potential areas where energy companies would be allowed to purchase leases between 2019 and 2024.

The letter, which is signed by 36 members of the California congressional delegation, urges Zinke to withdraw the plan and highlights Zinke’s subsequent decision to remove Florida’s coasts from the plan.

“In doing so you noted that Florida’s coasts ‘are highly reliant on tourism as an economic driver,’” the letter states.

Using that rationale, the letter goes on to say California must also be removed from the plan.

“In fact, California’s ocean economy and the sector dependent on tourism and recreation are both larger than those of Florida,” the letter states. “According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in 2014, the ocean economy contributed $41.9 billion to California’s gross domestic product, nearly half of which came from the tourism and recreation industries.”

Huffman said Thursday, “The letter does two things. One, it makes it very clear — as if Secretary Zinke needed this clarity — that California’s elected officials are overwhelmingly opposed to offshore drilling.

“The second thing is it gets at this point that Zinke himself created when he arbitrarily carved out Florida from their plans,” Huffman said. “You can’t say that Florida is somehow unique and not apply the same standard to California and other coastal states.

“If their drilling proposal picks and chooses among coastal states based on politics,” Huffman said, “it is not going to pass legal muster.”

An oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara in 1969 spewed about 4.2 million gallons of oil into the ocean, devastating recreation, property, the fishing industry and wildlife. Drilling off the California coast has been banned since then.

“If we open the Pacific to additional leases, it is not a question of if, but when the next disaster will occur,” the letter states.

Last month, Congress repealed offshore drilling safety regulations adopted after the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent spill. One of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history, the spill released 215 million gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico, fouling beaches in Florida and Louisiana.

“So they want to do a lot more offshore drilling with a lot lower standards to prevent accidents,” Huffman said.

Also in December, the Interior Department halted a study of the safety of offshore oil and gas drilling platforms by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine.

The Trump administration’s offshore drilling proposal comes a month after the Republicans’ tax overhaul opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling.

Zinke has said that the Obama administration cost the United States billions of dollars in lost revenue by blocking drilling on about 94 percent of the outer continental shelf.

Energy analysts question how eager oil companies will be to spend money on new exploration given oil prices and competition from natural gas and other renewable energy sources.

“But once you open up these areas for lease, it changes everything,” Huffman said.

“At that time they have a property right and if the government enacts a moratorium to prevent them from drilling, they will sue the federal government for taking.”

Scott Tye, chairman of the Marin chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, an activist network and nonprofit that works to protect the ocean and beaches, said, “Basically the offshore oil drilling issue is a nonstarter for the economics of California. Our tourist base is somewhere between $6 billion and $24 billion in California. They can’t extract that much oil out of the area.”